boksem.nl

I have a broad interest in human behaviour and in how the
brain orchestrates this behaviour. My research topics range from the
neural mechanisms of performance monitoring to the effects of mental
fatigue on cognition, to the effects of social status on behaviour, to
the effects on hormones on decision-making, to whether we can use brain
measurements from just a few individuals to say something about how the
population at large will behave.

The main theme of my research has been performance monitoring and
outcome evaluation: what happens in the brain when we make a mistake,
and how does this affect subsequent behaviour? Do we learn from our
mistakes? Can we pinpoint patterns of brain activity that predict
whether we will or will not learn from our mistakes? I am also
interested in how the social context influences how we evaluate our own
behaviour: how is it different for you when your decision resulted in
failure, while your colleague’s decision also resulted in
failure, compared to the situation where you have failed, but your
colleague succeeded? Are there differences in how the brain processes
these situations (in which your objective outcome is the same)? Does it
matter if this colleague is your supervisor or your assistant (i.e. how
does social status influence these processes)? How do other social
processes (for example how fair was the outcome) influence how you
evaluate your performance? How do hormone-levels, such as oxytocin,
testosterone and cortisol, influence how you evaluate actions, both
your own and those of others?

Over the last several years I have become interested in Neuroeconomics
(the branch of neuroscience that studies decision-making), and what is
now called Consumer Neuroscience (how knowledge of Neuroeconomics may
tell us something about how groups of individuals may respond to
persuasive messages and how this might affect their choice behaviour).
My main lines of research in these fields focusses on two central
questions: can we predict market behaviour from brain activity (and do
such neural measures add anything to more traditional measures), and do
brain measurements reveal additional evaluative information about
stimuli (persuasive messages such as commercials), which cannot be
obtained through self-report measures? We find that it is indeed
possible to predict the behaviour of large numbers of individuals in
the population from brain data obtained from a limited number of
students in our lab, and that these brain measures increase accuracy of
predicting both individual and population behaviour compared to
self-report measures alone. Moreover, we find that, using multivariate
approaches to analyses of fMRI and EEG data, it is possible to extract
information from the brain that reveals which emotions were elicited by
the stimulus, which mental representations were activated, and how
these emotions and representations predict preference and choice, both
at the individual level, as well as in the population at large.

Identifying
strong brands in the
brain.
Brand managers need to know how consumers perceive
their brands. Do consumers actually have the
‘right’ associations with brands as intended by the
companies? And are these associations consistent, or are they vastly
different across consumers? Until recently, all that brand managers
could do to find out, was to trust what consumers told them. But no
longer. Researchers Hang-Yee Chan, Maarten Boksem and Ale Smidts from
Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (RSM), literally
looked inside people’s heads and discovered that brand image
and brand image strength are clearly visible in our brains. Paper

Brain
scans reveal what makes a
TV advert effective.
What is it about a TV advert that triggers people to find the product
online? Scanning consumers’ brains has allowed Linda
Couwenberg
of Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (RSM) to discover
that a TV advert works best when it both highlights a
product’s
functional benefits and triggers the viewer’s imagination.
This
particular combination of elements activates specific parts of the
viewer’s brain most intensely, she found, which makes the
advert
more effective. Paper

Can
brain responses to movie
trailers predict success?
Decades of research have shown that much of our mental processing
occurs at the subconscious level, including the decisions we make as
consumers. These subconscious processes explain why we so often fail to
accurately predict our own future choices. Often what we "think" we
want has little or no bearing on the choices we actually make. Now a
new study provides the first evidence that brain measures "can" provide
significant added value to models for predicting consumer choice. Paper

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Latest work

Neural Profiling of Brands: Mapping Brand
Image in Consumers’ Brains with Visual Templates.We
demonstrate a novel template-based approach to profiling brand image
using functional magnetic resonance imaging. We compare
consumers’ brain responses during passive viewing of visual
templates (photos depicting various social scenarios) and brain
responses during active visualizing of a brand’s image, and
then
they generate individual neural profiles of brand image that correlate
with the participant’s own self-report perception of those
consumer brands. In aggregate, these neural profiles of brand image are
associated with perceived cobranding suitability and reflect brand
image strength rated by a separate and bigger sample of consumers. This
neural profiling approach offers a customizable tool for inspecting and
comparing brand-
specific mental associations, both across brands and across consumers. More…